The Obama administration’s plan for the federal budget will contain a new line-item that is numerically trivial but philosophically important: $15 million for states to analyze the costs and benefits of their job-licensing requirements. Appropriating a tiny sum of money to study what sounds like a technical issue may sound like a minor and uncontroversial step. In fact, it reframes one of the most interesting new policy debates that has emerged during the Obama era.

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Licensing barriers have no natural intellectual constituency. But the issue sits in a strange and as-yet-undefined place in the political debate. Because these regulations reside at the state level, a national solution is hard to devise. Conservatives have seized upon the issue mostly as a retort to taunt Democrats on inequality. If Obama were truly interested in reducing inequality, writes Nick Gillespie, he would work to reduce occupational licensing.